Tentative Plan for First Training Session

In order to discuss how to go about the first training session, I believe we need to discuss what materials we are going to use. Personally, my opinion would be that we should take various articles and chapters of the books we are currently reading and combine them into a writing manual. As mentioned in class, this would be extremely beneficial as the student we train could always refer back to the information we presented them. So my proposition would be this; to create in essence a manual that was organized such that we would cover say… 5 chapters/sections in the first session, then two in each subsequent session. The first session then would focus on the main points we put at the beginning of the manual.

The first goal we should have is to establish the relationship between tutor and mentee and ways to make them comfortable, and how to respond to comments. For example, we could take information from the Bedford guide.

Next, we should address the issue of the fix-it shop vs. abstract editing. Here we could gather information from the study of error article. A sub section of this chapter could be ESL students and how this issue alters depending on the type of student you are mentoring.

Lastly, how does one comment on a paper? After this section I think it would be a great idea to have sample essays. This could then act as a bridge to the following session. For example, go over one. And then assign them one of them to do for the next session.